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Zombieconomics: The Living Death of the Dismal Science in the Age of NeoLiberalism
Ben Fine
Paper for ESRC Neoliberalism Seminar, 1st April 2008,
http://www.cppr.ac.uk/centres/cppr/esrcneoliberalismseminar/
Introduction
From time to time, the capitalism has been likened to hell on earth not least
with those dark satanic mills. Rosa Luxemburg came close to perceiving capitalism as
a vampire system in arguing that it could only reproduce itself on an expanded scale
by absorbing non-capitalist production, thereby infecting the life-blood on which it
depended. This continues to have resonances in the current theory of accumulation by
dispossession, Harvey (2003) and Fine (2006) for critique. Frimpong-Ansah (1991)
has posited the African vampire state as the antithesis of the developmental state. And
there is also the classic contribution by Taussig (1980) in which confrontation with
the commodity is perceived as experiencing the devil itself, quite apart from the
moneylenders in the temple.1
But the ideas that economics itself derives from the underworld is, as far as I
know, rare if not unknown. But, as I will argue, the current phase of economics as
zombie-like is particularly apt. Not that economics is short of pejorative labels, from
the dismal science first put forward by Thomas Carlyle for failing to keep individuals
in their designated (servile) positions, through to the autism with which it has most
recently been labelled in the pursuit of greater heterodoxy. Even the mainstream itself
has garnered unprecedented levels of popularity, hitting the best seller lists, by selfdeprecatingly referring to itself as “Freakononomics”, see Levitt and Dubner (2006)
and Fine and Milonakis (2008) for critique and for details for much else in this
contribution.
There are two reasons why the mainstream economics in the current phase of
neo-liberalism is zombie-like. First, it is both dead and alive at the same time, undead
as popular culture would have it. That it prevails within its own disciplinary
boundaries with little or no contest and with scant respect for alternatives is more or
less uncontroversial. No one can doubt that there are zombieconomists out there and
that they are extraordinarily powerful and almost impossible to slay. They are totally
insensitive to the considerations of the living but merely respond to an inner
inescapable logic and, occasionally, perpetrate mysterious jerking movements of their
own. The recent emergence of neuroeconomics is an extraordinary testament to this
phenomenon. Building upon insights from neuroscience that reveal some of the
workings of the brain, it might be thought that the rational economic agent of
mainstream economics would have to be rejected since the science shows that other
influences on individual behaviour are much faster than rational calculation. But one
school of neuroeconomics cleverly suggests that the optimising individual is aware of
these flaws and takes them into account in optimising.2 For Glimcher et al (2005, p.
253), “Neoclassical economics and utility theory on which it is based provide the
ultimate set of tools for describing these efficient solutions; and evolutionary theory
defines the field within which mechanism is optimized by neoclassical constraints:
and neurobiology provides the tools for elucidating those mechanisms”. As the
Guardian Newspaper pithily put it ironically citing a journal from which
neuroeconomics would draw its inspiration, “The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
… elegantly show(s) that people will buy into bogus explanations much more readily
when they are dressed up with a few technical words from the world of
neuroscience”, p. 10, February 16th, 2008.
So zombieconomics is alive but it is not well because it is also dead, in two
senses, as the genre would have it. On the one hand, it is entirely parasitic upon the
living, feeding upon it in order to sustain its own life. It has nothing new of its own to
contribute. It can only prosper and must do so by feeding upon the living. On the
other hand, in so feeding, it not only degrades whatever it touches but also transforms
it into its own condition. The process can only come to an end in that nightmare
vision in which we have all become zombies. It is apparent that the appropriate
metaphor for economics is one of zombies and not vampires, with Dracula at least a
cultured and sophisticated being well-attuned to the sensitivities of both his victims
and their cultures and histories.
How did this situation come about and why does it take the form that it does
now? In successive sections, we trace the evolution of economics from the marginalist
revolution of the 1870s through the Keynesian revolution and the monetarist
counterrevolution to the current phase of economics imperialism in which both
economic and non-economic analysis is primarily reduced to the optimising behaviour
of individuals in face of market imperfections. It is such reductionism that endows
zombieconomics with so much life but with so little content both in terms of
analytical elements and understanding of contemporary capitalism.
2 From Marginalist to Formalist Revolution
Putting aside a few technical developments, the core components of orthodox,
mainstream neoclassical economics would be readily recognised and understood by
the marginalist economists of the 1870s. Indeed, many of the concepts now used were
put forward and popularised by Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics, first
published in 1891 and the main economics textbook for the next fifty years, and
running to eight editions. The marginalist revolution put forward the notion of
economic rationality and sought to draw out its implications from optimising
behaviour for the theory of supply (production) and demand (consumption). It gave
rise to what might be termed a technical apparatus associated with a utility function to
explain demand and a production function to explain supply, and corresponding
marginal utility and productivity.
As far as the development of the current principles of mainstream economics
is concerned, the interwar period was dominated by placing the technical apparatus on
as sound a footing as possible. In particular, the task was set of incorporating
marginalism into a mathematical form in which the consequences of economic
rationality could be identified in a tight deductive fashion. For example, does an
optimum exist for the consumer, is it unique, is it efficient, do demand curves always
slope downwards, and so on. Answers to these questions were elusive especially
without the support of an extraordinarily restrictive range of assumptions and methods
to accommodate them. Or, to put it more constructively, the goal of answering these
questions became imperative, and almost any sacrifice would be made in order to
attain this goal.
The result was what might be termed an implosion of the marginalist
principles in upon themselves, a sort of squeezing to death. In brief, first, utility itself
was reduced from general well-being to a logic of choice across bundles of goods.
Second, preferences as the basis for those choices were assumed to be fixed. Third,
these preferences were the only rationale for behaviour. Fourth, technical assumptions
were made about consumer choices, such as convexity (a mix is better than a pure
consumption) and non-satiation. Similarly, production became a simple technical
relationship in which inputs, including labour, are seen as physical entities which
make output through given technologies. Fifth, both individuals and goods were
stripped of any meaning and became abstract formal symbols of themselves. Sixth,
issues of method were simply overlooked as deductivism came to the fore
independent of any claims to realism or otherwise.
Significantly, then, in the early 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression,
Lionel Robbins could seek to draw upon what was happening and project it further by
defining economics as the allocation of scarce resources between competing ends. But
this was, certainly at the time, a mistake in conflating a certain part of economics as it
was emerging with economics as a whole, Backhouse and Medema (2007a and b).
For the vast majority of economists, and other social scientists, the pursuit of the
implications of the optimising individual as a reflection of modern market society was
as legitimate academic exercise. But it did and could not fill out the domain of
economics either as a discipline or a subject matter. For the latter, for example,
Parsons (1934) was highly critical of Robbins for his definition but saw it as fixing a
method quite distinct from that of sociology which would examine economic material
from a different social perspective. More generally, the other social sciences were in
the process of formation at this time and continued to incorporate the economic,
economic history being most notable with its attachment to inductive as opposed to
deductive methods.
But, equally important, the new marginalist principles were seen to be at most
a part of an economic explanation. In particular, they had no purchase upon other
motives of individuals as well as systemic behaviour. They were at most the science
of reduced individual behaviour in market-type situations. The inadequacy of such
principles could not have been more strikingly exposed than by the mass
unemployment of the 1930s for which, as microeconomics, they needed to be
complemented by an entirely different set of principles and, with them, the division of
the discipline into microeconomics and macroeconomics with the latter dominated by
Keynesianism. In addition, there remained in place throughout the interwar period,
strong commitment to what would now be called heterodox economics, with old
institutionalism to the fore.
In short, during the interwar period, microeconomic principles were in the
process of being established but only at the expense of an implosion or reductionism
to an extraordinarily narrow range of assumptions and methods, ones that were
unacceptable to the rest of economics let alone the other social sciences, and whose
scope of application was perceived to be confined to the science of market supply and
demand. This was, however, not so much to be changed as to be thrown into reverse.
In describing developments within economics between 1945 and 1955 as a “formalist
revolution”, Blaug (1999, 2001 and 2003) highlights what is an uncontroversial and
rapid process in which mathematical and statistical techniques assumed much greater,
and ultimately, overwhelming significance. But we are less concerned with the rise of
formal techniques than with shift in substantive content and the reasons for it.
This has a number of elements. First, during this period, the goal of perfecting
the technical apparatus was finally accomplished both for the consequences of the
optimising individual (the Hicks-Slutsky-Samuelson conditions) but also for general
equilibrium theory (Arrow-Debreu) focusing upon the conditions under which
optimising individuals as a whole are coordinated through the market mechanism.
Second, the centre of gravity for economics switched from the UK to the US,
symbolised by the rise of importance of Samuelson in place of Marshall/Keynes. And
Samuelson (1947) had not only been at the forefront of advancing the technical
apparatus, he also authored the single most important textbook, Samuelson (1948),
see below, that now appears in its eighteenth edition as well as a reprint of the original
so important is it to the history of (the teaching of) economic thought. Third, a
remarkable flip in the analytical status of the core technical apparatus began to gather
momentum, from implosion to allow itself to be established to explosion of scope of
application.
The latter gave rise to “economics imperialism”. This involves appropriating
the subject matter of other disciplines by reducing it to the principles of marginalism.
There is a historical logic underpinning this process. The logic is that, once obtained,
the marginalist principles have no limitations set upon their scope of application since
they are universal in content. Optimising and utility and production functions, after
all, have no ties to historical or social specificity by time, place or activity. They can,
in principle, be applied to anything. In practice, though, historically the principles
were first obtained, as indicated, by confining them to a particular type of behaviour
in a particular context, the market. Consequently, and subsequently, where and how
the boundaries are drawn between the application of these principles and those of the
other social sciences is contingent, both upon the internal character and dynamics of
the constituent disciplines of the social sciences themselves and the external
influences upon them.
In particular, in the wake of the formalist revolution, attempts were first made
to extend the application of the “economic approach” to non-economic subject matter,
in the first phase of economics imperialism. The phrase derives from Gary Becker,
dubbed by Demsetz (1997, p. 1), in the context of economics imperialism, as having
“earned Commander-in-chief ranking in the EEF (Economics Expeditionary Forces)”.
For Becker, all social phenomena should be treated as if the consequence of economic
rationality in an as if market situation. Alongside the new economic history, the
economic approach achieved considerable success, not least with public choice theory
and human capital theory.
3 From Formalist to Keynesian Revolution3
But what it did not achieve with or even on the basis of the formalist
revolution was the triumph of neo-liberal economics. The period straddling the
formalist revolution was undoubtedly Keynesian in character despite the undoubted
bias, if not predetermined predisposition, towards laissez-faire that is part and parcel
of the technical apparatus of mainstream economics. There are a number of reasons
for this with implications for the continuing prospects for economics as a discipline.
First, the experience of interwar depression and war-time controls more or less
precluded an exclusive let alone a predominance of laissez-faire economics. Second,
though, this does not mean an absence of influence from this direction in the anticommunist Cold War environment. These conclusions are confirmed, and with wider
significance, by considering “The Coming of Keynesianism to America”, a volume
edited by Colander and Landreth.4 J. K. Galbraith (1975, p. 141) takes for granted,
possibly as late as was feasible in light of the imminent monetarist counter-revolution,
that,5 “Keynesian policies are the new orthodoxy”. He judges that Samuelson “almost
from the outset was the acknowledged leader of the younger Keynesian community”,
p. 136. With the comfortable hindsight of the victor, he also treats the ideological
context of the construction of Keynesianism in the immediate post-war period as
something of a joke, with those promoting it, “identifying Keynesianism with
socialism, Fabian socialism, Marxism, Communism, Fascism and also literary incest,
meaning that one Keynesian always reviewed the works of another Keynesian”, p.
139. By contrast, those of “conservative mood … who objected to Keynes were also
invariably handicapped by the fact that they hadn’t (and couldn’t) read the book. It
was like attacking the original Kama Sutra for obscenity without being able to read
Sanskrit. Still, where social change is involved, there are men who can surmount any
handicap”, pp. 138-9.
Such lingering sarcasm over the cursory knowledge and scholarship of antiKeynesians no doubt reflects the relatively mild and short-term discomfort that
Galbraith himself experienced as a result of the fall-out for Keynesians from anticommunism.6 His appointment to Harvard was held up for a year in the late 1940s as
a result of concerted opposition from Harvard graduates, members of the
inappropriately named Veritas Foundation, with books such as God and Man at Yale
in 1951, through to Keynes at Harvard in 1960, being published in the campaign
against Keynesianism and Keynesians, Colander and Landreth (1996, pp. 12-3). The
latter cite the President of Harvard at the beginning of this period to the effect that,
“Keynes name had taken on a symbolic value …To a certain type of businessman, it
was a proverbial red rag. In the eyes of many economically illiterate but deeply
patriotic (and well-to-do) citizens, to accuse a professor of being a Keynesian was
almost equivalent to branding him a subversive agent”, p. 12. As Backhouse (2006, p.
16) puts it, “Prominent Keynesians, from Galbraith to Samuelson were vilified and
labelled Marxists or communists”.7
In short, Keynesianism in the immediate post-war period was a hot political
and ideological potato, sharpening and representing major differences between
Republicans and Democrats, and differing responses both to the experience of
interwar depression and the way in which to preclude such in the future. With the
post-war boom and the passage through the extremes of McCarthyite anticommunism, such differences were tempered as Keynesianism became the orthodoxy.
But, even if its ultimate triumph was inevitable – and as long as the economy was
doing well and this could be imputed to macroeconomic management – the forms and
direction taken by Keynesianism were not fixed at the outset.8
In this light, Colander and Landreth usefully point to the Keynesian revolution
as comprising theoretical, political and textbook elements. But it is inappropriate to
see these as separate from one another. Whilst Samuelson became the leading figure
in promoting Keynesianism in the United States, he was not in the lead initially,
especially as far as a textbook is concerned. That he should be considered to have
dominated Keynesianism in the United States at the outset is understandable. His text
Economics first appeared in 1948, and is now in its eighteenth edition with William
Nordhaus as co-author from 1985. It has spawned many imitators apart from its own
adoption across the US and elsewhere as textbook. It is sufficiently important as a text
in the history of economic thought to have been reissued in 1998 in its original
edition. Significantly, Samuelson had published what were essentially the results from
his own PhD thesis one year earlier than his textbook. His Foundations of Economic
Analysis is a classic of a different type. It is based on the application of the principles
of thermodynamics to economic problems, particularly those of individual
optimisation and the corresponding equilibrium of economic systems.
It is easy to recognise that the two books are entirely different, especially as
far as motivation and level are concerned. But each contributed to the revolution in
economic theory in its own way across both theory and text. For, in the revolution in
economic thought around Keynesianism, the distinction between theory and textbook
(and politics) is not so sharp until the new ideas become orthodoxy. In the first decade
after the second world war, economics as a discipline was undergoing multiple shifts
in content and technique. Significantly, in the forefront of Keynesian texts in the
United States before Samuelson was the now unknown Lorie Tarshis, someone who
had had the advantage of studying at Cambridge in the 1930s. His text was published
in 1947, and rapidly became adopted throughout the United States. As he puts it,
Colander and Landreth (1996, p. 68):
In the first two or three months in which the book came out I would get letters
… saying Brown had adopted it, maybe Middlebury adopted it, Yale had
adopted it – one place after another had adopted it. Every time I got a letter
like this that indicated ten more adoptions or twenty more adoptions, I
thought, “Boy, that bank account will be picking up”.
But then came the reaction, “It was a nasty performance, an organized campaign in
which they sent newsletters to all the trustees of all the universities that had adopted
the book”. Orders started being cancelled as universities became concerned about,
even suffering threats of, loss of endowments. “Sales, instead of staying at that
beautiful peak, went down just like that … But it really died in 1948 or 1949. And
then Paul Samuelson’s book came out a year later, in 1948”.
But why should Samuelson have been able to rescue, save, appropriate and/or
promote the Keynesian revolution and, in doing so, was it made into something
different than it would otherwise have been? Tarshis himself is tart to the point of
sarcasm about Samuelson’s Keynesianism, “Paul Samuelson was not in the
Keynesian [discussion] group. He was busy working on his own thing. That he
became a Keynesian was laughable”, Colander and Landreth (1996, p. 64).
Interestingly, though, both Samuelson, p. 160, and Tarshis, p. 69, seem mystified over
why one should have replaced the other. But it is worth ranging over Tarshis’ (1947)
text to understand why, bearing in mind that the slightest deviation from market
fundamentalism is liable to attract outrage from his opponents. His treatment of
Keynes comes at the end of his book, after a full coverage of microeconomics and
other topics. He bends over backwards to disassociate himself from political
attachments. Thus, p. 347:
A word must be said, before we begin our analysis, about the political
implications of the Keynesian theory … The truth is simple. The Keynesian
theory no more supports the New Deal stand or the Republican stand than do
the newest data on atomic fission … It is possible, as we shall see later, to
frame either the Republican or the Democratic economic dogma in terms of
the theory. After all, both good Republicans and good Democrats can analyze
the causes of mental illness or of faulty timing in an automobile engine. And
so the following chapters are neither an attack upon, nor a defense of, the
beliefs of individual political parties. Rather, they are intended to show how a
good many modern economists analyze this primary economic problem.
Now if you are anti-Keynesian and see it as thin end of the wedge of communism,
you are not going to take kindly to such claims of irrefutability across all political
positions, and you might find it more palatable if Keynesian were presented in neutral
terms without political claims at all. And, the problem referred to as primary follows
immediately in the next paragraph, “The importance of avoiding unemployment
cannot be overstressed”. And it can be avoided, “The upshot of the analysis … is that
unemployment can be cured”, p. 528. And this is also taken, some might think
provocatively, as meaning that capitalism does not have to be overthrown, “Our
knowledge of how capitalism works shows us that we can prevent that suffering [from
unemployment]. And we have certainly found no reason to conclude that we have to
scrap the system to do it”, p. 529.
Tarshis has already indicated some sympathy for working people as far as
employment is concerned. For him, wages should be raised as far as possible as is
consistent with full employment, not least because this is the most important way of
improving the gains of all and, in veiled terms, of guarding against social unrest,
“Labor’s primary interest is to maintain full employment; but that is not at all in
conflict with the interests of other groups, for the employer, the farmer, and the
investor all gain when we have peak prosperity. If we can keep the national income at
its maximum, it will not be necessary for labor to live ‘across the tracks’. Our
economy can produce enough to provide a decent livelihood for all if we do away
with depression”, p. 657.
But such a community of interests, harmonised by Keynesianism, does not
extend to monopolisation. For, “As long as so great a degree of monopoly exists, it is
probable that output will be below capacity, distribution of the output will be unequal,
and the pattern of production will remain unbalanced … Thus, growing monopoly is
likely to be harmful to the rest of the economy which is left behind in the race to
secure monopoly status, and it may even injure the groups that achieve it, since their
prosperity depends in part upon the prosperity of the economy as a whole.
Nonetheless, it is difficult to control monopoly, as the most casual glance at the world
about us will show”, pp. 679-80. Whilst this does place monopoly capital in the dock,
with labour as potentially unemployment victim, Tarshis close his book in more
neutral terms, with Keynesianism as the cure-all as opposed to detailed intervention,
p. 687:
While it may be legitimate for each group to improve its lot at the expense of
competing groups, the struggle to do so becomes anti-social when it causes a
reduction in the total output of the economy. The damage done by such a
struggle can be most successfully prevented, not by legislative restraint, but by
society’s adopting measures to keep the total output as high as possible, its
composition as nearly ideal as possible, and the distribution as fair as possible.
When that is done, the economic problem will be solved.
Tarshis does combine an ethos of scientific neutrality and the preservation of
capitalism with tinges of pro-labour sympathy and anti-monopoly antipathy. Place
this in the context of Keynesianism for conservatives as representing a conscious,
possibly deliberately veiled, or unconscious strategy for more deep-rooted change,
and it is hardly surprising that he should attract a vitriolic campaign against his text
being universally adopted across American universities.
It follows that the political climate may not have prevented the rise of
Keynesianism in the United State, but it seems to have had some influence over both
its theoretical direction and its textbook content, most obviously as dictated by
Samuelson. As Backhouse (2006, p. 16) puts it, surely too cautiously, “doubts about
its closeness to communism did not prevent Keynesianism from becoming widely
accepted in academia, though that may have contributed to its being expressed in
more careful, technical language than might otherwise have been the case”. But it is
not simply a matter of whether Keynesianism but also of what Keynesianism. For
there are sufficient differences in substance between Samuelson’s treatment and that
of Tarshis, whose style and content of analysis is unrecognisable by comparison with
macroeconomic texts today. And it is not simply a matter of the differences as they
were but as they might have become. Tarshis’, for example, is not so far short of the
approach being offered by Kalecki, the major difference being the latter’s denial of
the possibility of eliminating unemployment under capitalism for want of its capacity
to discipline workers when jobs can be left without fear of being unable to gain
another. But the emphasis on monopoly as a key characteristic of the Keynesian
system – as output restricting and distributionally disadvantageous to real wages and
effective demand - was inspired by Kalecki but has only survived in the heterodoxy of
post-Keynesianism.
That is but for one exception of possibly more than symbolic significance. The
treatment of monopoly as a source of systemic stagnation was soon to become the
major element in the leading Marxist approach to US capitalism, and most closely
associated with Paul Sweezy, the country’s leading Marxist over the last fifty years of
the twentieth century.9 For him, monopolies were capable of generating a surplus that
they were incapable of realising through sale on the market. However, Sweezy had
been an orthodox Harvard economist in the early 1930s before converting via
Keynesianism to Marxism during that decade. And he was a close associate of Lorie
Tarshis. They first met in the early 1930s in London (at the well-known restaurant,
Bertorelli’s,10 Sweezy being a student at the London School of Economics). As
Tarshis puts it, “he was so Hayekian, even Hayek was too far to the left for Paul
Sweezy in those days”, Colander and Landreth (1996, p. 58). They met again at
Harvard in 1936, “By then he’d already gone all the way over to Keynes and a little
bit more”. For those, looking for reds under the beds, Tarshis innocently confesses, “I
saw an awful lot of Paul from then till 1930 or 1940”, p. 59. For those looking to
associate Keynesianism with something worse, potentially or otherwise, Tarshis’ text
and his association with Paul Sweezy would appear to have been more than damning.
In short, given outside influences, it is hardly surprising that Keynesianism
should take the route laid out by Samuelson as opposed to Tarshis. But this was not
just a matter of external influence on what may or may not have been acceptable. It
also reflected developments within the discipline itself. It is, for example, apparent
that Keynes himself, as he was formulating The General Theory, became opposed to
methodological individualism, to mathematical modelling (other than as a guide to
clear thinking and presentation) and, most of all, to econometrics (for fixing
parameter values to an economy necessarily subject to uncertainty and waves of
expectations). Yet, with the exception of the methodological individualism, the
Keynesian revolution that bore his name was to be developed along these lines, most
notably in the IS/LM approach to macroeconomics and the building and estimation of
macroeconomic models.
The exception here of methodological individualism is important. For, despite
its consolidation through the formalist revolution, mainstream macroeconomics
remained for the time-being immune from its charms and drew upon more or less
theoretically arbitrary ways of constructing macroeconomic aggregates. One reason
for this is that the way in which the microeconomic principles had been established,
and the qualifications associated with them, remained fresh in the mind of the new
generation of mathematical economists. It was not simply a matter of the difficulty of
extrapolating the behaviour of the individual to the behaviour of the economic system
as a whole, as had been accomplished with general equilibrium theory. But, in
addition, the newly completed principles were extraordinarily vulnerable to the
introduction of any rogue element, at least until established as a conventional wisdom.
There could be no externalities, interdependent preferences, market imperfections,
uncertainty, institutions, non-economic behaviour and so on. No role could be found
for money. As a result, mainstream economics remained aloof from developments
that it would embrace so warmly later on precisely because of their destructive
implications for its core principles.
This is apparent from Amadae’s (2003) account of the promotion and rise of
rational choice across US social science. During the period of the formalist revolution,
as the neoclassical technical apparatus was consolidating its hold over the discipline,
“within the university, rational choice theory developed as a series of overlapping,
multidisciplinary revolutions … three distinct disciplinary transformations … social
choice, public choice, and positive political theory … The path-breaking rational
choice scholars all shared two institutional foci crucial to the institutional and
professional success of rational choice”, pp. 11-2. These were the RAND (Research
and Development Corporation) and the Public Choice Society. The aim of RAND was
in part to inform US military strategy, and it called upon economists and other social
scientists to investigate self-interested behaviour from a variety of perspectives. So,
long before they were taken up in economics in its now latest phase of economics
imperialism, see below, there was a focus on game theory, behaviouralism, and
strategising. As Amadae puts it, p. 77:
The theory of rational choice has interlocking descriptive, normative, and
prescriptive components, and was developed to inform action respecting
nuclear strategy and complex questions of weapon procurement.
As a result, it deployed a diverse toolbox and, at least in principle, exhibited a close
attachment to US Cold War policy.
These were not particularly attractive to a neoclassical economics,
consolidating around Keynesianism and Pigovian welfarism. But the relative lack of
interest by economists in these at the time did not reflect a lack of involvement. On
the contrary, Arrow served as an intern at RAND in 1948, “charged with determining
a mathematical expression for the Soviet Union’s collective utility function that
would be useful for game theoretic strategy computations of nuclear brinkmanship”,
p. 85. But, for Arrow himself, the consequences of his research were always
contradictory, promoting the technical and conceptual apparatus associated with the
methodological individualism of neoclassical economics at the same time as
expressing its limitations. Thus, his famous impossibility theorem for social choice is
rooted in individualism and idealist democratic values. Indeed, even if a social choice
could be found, it requires a dictator to implement it, as the approach is entirely
devoid of political process other than a formal, mathematical mechanism translating
to social from individual choices. More generally, Mirowski (2007a) dubs Arrow the
“Cowles poster boy”, with his popularity within the profession reflecting the irony of
repudiating at one time or another each of the mainstream advances that he had
himself made, and Cowles itself reflecting an interventionist stance at macro and
micro levels, see also Mirowski (2007b).
Thus, if Arrow’s approach straddled both developing neoclassical economics
and exposing its limitations in pursuit of a Keynesian and welfarist democracy, the
goals of the Public Choice Society set the opposite extreme. It had relatively little
interest in contributing to the formalist revolution as such other than in appropriating
any argument, past or present, that would limit the role of the state and promote
individual freedom as they saw it. It was violently opposed to the very idea of social
(as opposed to public) choice, Arrowian or otherwise, with their most famous and
influential product being public choice theory. As Amadae (2003, p. 136) puts it,
“Buchanan and his collaborators … strictly upheld the premise that any discussion of
public interest or social welfare violated their commitment to individualistic
philosophy”. Crucial in this respect is the figure of Hayek. As Mirowski (2007c)
perceptively observes, his own intellectual trajectory draws upon very different
approaches. But what they have in common is the wish to popularise intellectually the
case for neo-liberalism. Initially, these may have drawn upon orthodox economic
thinking in the dispute with Keynes and the market socialism debate but, ultimately,
the Road to Serfdom, the founding document for neo-liberalism, involves an entire
break from mainstream economics and is entirely incompatible with it, drawing upon
uncertainty, innovation and spontaneous order.
So, with the formalist revolution focused upon and inspired by the individual, neoliberalism in theory was confined to the individual, too vulnerable to be extended to
the economy as a whole as such or to incorporate previously excluded elements
underpinning the systemic case for neo-liberalism based on spontaneous order,
inventiveness, or uncertainty. Samuelson’s own account of conversion to
Keynesianism in Colander and Landreth (1996) is extraordinarily revealing in these
respects. For him, becoming a Keynesian was a matter of overcoming or, more
exactly, unsuccessfully reconciling it with his prior predilection for microfoundations. He confesses, “What I resisted in Keynes the most was the notion that
there could be equilibrium unemployment”, p. 159. Indeed, “I was like a tuna: the
Keynesian system had to land me, and I was fighting every inch of the line. I was
worried about micro foundations”, p. 161. He places considerable emphasis on his
own personal experience of unemployment, finding himself unable to get a summer
job as a student at any wage to relieve family poverty, p. 161. So Samuelson wanted
to be a Keynesian but could not marry it with microeconomic principles. How did he
resolve this conundrum? The plain answer is that he did not and simply accepted this.
For, “I was content to assume that there was enough rigidity in relative prices and
wages to make the Keynesian alternative to Walras operative”, the presumption being
the presence of some “substructure of administered prices and imperfect
competition”, p. 160. And, in retrospect, he judges that, “It’s a modern desire to have
impeccable micro foundations for macro … I decided that life was more fruitful not
worrying about it … Moreover, the search today for micro foundations for macro does
not have a rich set of results … It’s because I get a better positivistic macroeconomics
to do some worrying about the micro foundations that I do the worrying, and not
because I have a tidy conscience that everybody’s micro foundations must be tidy”, p.
162.
3 From Keynesian Revolution to Monetarist Counterrevolution
Samuelson’s retrospective account has a modern ring about it in its mode of
expression, with its reference to micro-foundations for macroeconomics. For his
attitude is embedded in his and the discipline’s past, with an ill-concealed contempt
for such micro-foundations in and of themselves as a logical exercise in mathematical
consistency (with his target being the New Classical Economics, see below). For
Samuelson’s generation, Keynesianism was macro, and it floated systemically free
from micro, although the latter might offer ideas on how to go about the former. Thus,
Samuelson offers a remarkably frank confession, that his Keynesian macro had not
been landed in the sense of being founded on sound micro foundations, and he had
ceased to care about this. But it is a little bit too convenient in the extent to which the
presumed microfoundations are those of a little bit of rigidity in prices, derived from
“imperfect competition”, and incorporated into an equilibrium, possibly at less than
full employment for the economy as a whole. For the reference to imperfect
competition, and the use to which it is put, scarcely begins to get to grips with the
systemic consequences of the monopolisation of modern capitalism, and other
features, and its implications for its dynamic let alone its level of economic activity.
To some extent this helps us to explain why Tarshis should have given way to
Samuelson, even though both were Keynesians, and without relying upon relatively
less important factors such as Samuelson’s powers of exposition and his use of
mathematics as a neutrally professional and more acceptable form of exposition.
For one of the consequences of the Keynesian and formalist revolutions was to
divide the discipline into microeconomics and macroeconomics as its core constituent
theoretical components, with the remainder of the subject matter relegated to the
applied or policy backburner both for its lesser analytical principles and practical
significance. By the same token, the conventional wisdom became one in which the
postwar boom was perceived to have been the triumph of interventionist Keynesian
policymaking over the instability created by unfettered markets. In addition,
somewhat inconsistently, analytically, macroeconomics became pre-occupied with
short-run deviations around given long-term trends. In this way, the major factors
underpinning the postwar boom were simply overlooked or reduced to epiphenomena.
In these, I would include the interpenetration of trade and investment within the
advanced countries, and the role of the state in expanding health, education and
welfare and in intervening to restructure domestic economies through measures
ranging across industrial policy to public ownership.
Consequently, with the collapse of the post-war boom in the 1970s, the crisis
of Keynesianism, and the resurgence of monetarism, the prospects for neo-liberalism
were entirely different than at the time of the formalist revolution. Not only were the
marginalist principles sacrosanct, they were also unburdened by any memory of the
extraordinary qualifications that had been necessary to allow them in the first place
either by assumption or scope of application. Becker-style economics imperialism
was well-established. And Thatcherism and Reaganism reigned supreme. The time
was more than ripe for the emergence of monetarism in its most extreme form, the
New Classical Economics, with the presumption that all markets work perfectly but
for random shocks, and that the principles of marginalist economics should be
extended to the macroeconomy. In addition, following Friedman, the idea of
expectations is reduced to the domain of knowable outcomes with attached
probabilities as opposed to the irreducible uncertainty associated with Keynesianism.
Further, the principle of optimisation is extended to include the processing of
information, in the theory of rational expectations so that individuals now optimise by
modelling the economy and, thereby, have the capacity to neutralise interventions by
the state as long as they can be anticipated. Other than in distorting microeconomic
functioning, the state is ineffective in macroeconomic policy. Indeed, in the wake of
the stagflation of the 1970s, it is truly remarkable that it should be felt possible to
understand the economy in terms of single representative individuals for households
and firms, with the leading New Classical Economists proclaiming, “the term
‘macroeconomic’ will simply disappear from use and the modifier ‘micro’ will be
superfluous”, Lucas (1987, p. 108), cited by Davis (2003, p. 35).
New Classical Economics, then, sought to wash Keynesianism away and,
without wishing to blame the victim, it could do so because of the latter’s narrow
understanding of macroeconomic theory itself, in leaving aside those systemic factors
that were not reducible to macroeconomic aggregates that could be incorporated into
mathematical models of supply and demand. But it is important to recognise, or recall,
that the neo-liberalism in scholarship of the New Classical Economics is highly
peculiar relative to the neo-liberalism both of ideology and practice. It is totally
orthogonal to neo-Austrian arguments concerning the virtues of free markets. And, in
practice, neo-liberalism has always been highly interventionist. This can be
understood in two ways. On the one hand, the free market is a myth and the state can
and does intervene to make markets work in particular ways and in favour of
particular interests. On the other hand, the ideology of non-intervention is more
appropriately seen as a rationale for discretionary and not minimal intervention.
In this light, it is not surprising that there are many different accounts of, and
forms taken by, neo-liberalism. They all involve a transformation as opposed to a
reduction of the role of the state. But what we can now see after thirty years of neoliberalism is that it is heavily driven by the vested interests, practices and ideology of
finance, not least through what has been appropriately termed financialisation. This
involves both the proliferation of “fictitious” financial markets built upon existing
activities as well as the creation of new spheres of operation for finance, Fine (2007a)
for an account. For the New Classical Economics, of course, this proliferation of
finance would not occur unless it were efficient in mobilising and allocating resources
and managing risk. This is stretching credibility when the rewards at a macro-level of
managing finance are exceeding those of using it. And, with the emergence, however,
over the last decade of financial crises, and the threat that these may become global,
this logic is running incredibly thin, and the first port of call for intervention to rescue
financial markets always comes from those markets themselves.
4 From Monetarist Counterrevolution to Zombieconomics
This all suggests that neo-liberalism is currently going through a second phase,
distinct enough from the first that it can be perceived as a reaction against neoliberalism itself as Third Wayism, the social market or whatever. For, whilst the first
phase involved state promotion of interests through the market, especially liberating
financial markets, the second phase is faced with both ameliorating the consequences
of this shock therapy and of continuing to intervene to allow it to be sustained. The
emphasis, in principle, is upon how to make markets work in general and socially
acceptably however that might be defined in employment, distribution and welfare
delivery. In practice, the markets given the greatest priority will be those of finance.
As is apparent, the New Classical Economics (and neo-liberal ideology more
generally) is totally inadequate to this task other than as an unremitting pressure
against collectivist forms of provision and interests. Exactly the opposite is the case
for the new information-theoretic economics which emphasises the importance of
market imperfections. For, crucial to the New Classical Economics is the assumption
of perfectly working and instantaneously clearing markets, supply always equals
demand. This reflected the monetarist world vision that markets work well if left to
themselves as well as an analytical challenge to argue otherwise than, “interfere in
markets and you prevent them from working well”. The market imperfections
approach offered an answer, especially in case of imperfect information. In such
circumstances, it could be shown that markets might not be efficient, they might not
clear (persistent imbalance between supply and demand), or that markets might fail to
arise altogether. This is so even if prices were perfectly flexible in principle. Indeed,
an employer, for example, might not reduce wages despite high levels of
unemployment in order to maximise profit through attracting more productive,
disciplined and loyal workforce on average.
In short, the new market (and information) imperfection approach displayed
an ability to address macroeconomic problems despite being based on the aggregated
optimising behaviour of individuals. In this way, the technical apparatus of utility and
production functions could be used to extend microeconomics to incorporate
macroeconomics, even that with a Keynesian flavour. Together with other
developments within microeconomics, especially those related to the now acceptable
game theory, this allowed the use of the technical apparatus of consumer and producer
theory to be extended almost universally across the discipline of economics. Areas
that had previously been seen to be more applied, inductive and policy-oriented –
from industrial through to development economics – increasingly came under the
umbrella of the microeconomic principles that had only been established initially by
accepting their limited scope of application.
Nor has this process of expansion of microeconomic principles been confined
within the borders of economics. Previously, as indicated, economics imperialism had
been based on the idea of treating the non-market as if it were the (perfectly working)
market by other means. By contrast, with the market imperfections approach to the
economy, the non-market could be understood as the induced response to those
market imperfections, whether this be institutions, culture or customs. Whereas
previously these had been seen as irrelevant or, at most, an irrational barrier to the (as
if) perfectly working market, it was now possible to explain their existence and see
them as a way of improving upon imperfectly working markets. The effect was to
reinvigorate economics imperialism across a broader front and to render it more
palatable to other social sciences despite its methodological and theoretical
peculiarities from the perspective of other disciplines. Whilst methodological
individualism of a special type (utility maximisation) persisted, it could be cloaked in
less dismissive terms of the other social sciences. For it now accepted that institutions
and history matter rather than being seen as at most temporary obstacles to the reach
of the perfectly working market across all economic and social life.
Thus, economics imperialism has built upon old fields and created new ones in
and around the borders of economics, the new growth theory, the new trade theory,
the new economic sociology, the new institutional economics, the new welfare
economics, the new political economy, the new economic geography, the new
development economics, and so on. In a sense, it has done this in two different ways.
First, it has brought back in what was previously left out in the reductionist process by
which its technical apparatus was established. In general terms, the “social” becomes
important where the social ranges over the non-market and the non-individualistic
even though these still remain tied to optimising behaviour – individuals choose to be
altruistic, for example, because it is a way of overcoming market imperfections or
coordination problems.
Second, though, this often leads to what might be termed mixed or dirty
models. Whether for theoretical or empirical expediency, the standard technical
apparatus is supplemented by some other factor or set of factors appropriated from
another social science or simply through speculative reasoning. This is to bridge the
previous divide between rational and irrational. A good example is the recently
prominent economics of happiness where populations do not seem to report
themselves happier despite rising incomes over time. It is a simple matter to add in
some other variable to utility theory to address this, the most convenient being
reference to relative income position. Then we are able to explain why short-run
increases in one person’s income improves feelings of well-being but not
improvements in income for everybody over time as relative positions remain the
same. This is the basis for freakonomics - with an inclination to rely upon selfinterest, a willingness to incorporate other factors as necessary, and otherwise to
provoke by appeal to statistical analysis and other damn lies.
But freakonomics is just the most popular form taken by zombieconomics,
itself the form of economics imperialism in the age of neo-liberalism. This approach
is dead in that it is based upon an unquestioned methodological individualism and
technical apparatus of the narrowest type, it is totally ignorant of its own history, of its
methodology and of alternatives, and it fails to engage with them except to dismiss
them as unscientific and lacking in rigour (whereas it is its own intellectual fragilities
in these respects that are most marked, Fine (2007b). It has no concept of the
systemic, such as globalisation, nor of power and conflict, and it has no understanding
of the meaning of categories of analysis in terms of historical and social specificity
other than in defining path dependence, initial conditions or choice between models or
equilibria. And it is undead in blundering around looking for applications out of the
incidence of market imperfections, whether in the dimly incorporated real world, or
through appropriation and degradation of the material of other social sciences. In the
realm of policy, it seeks interventions to correct market imperfections on a piecemeal
basis and, even though recognising that such imperfections arise in financial systems
themselves, fails to address how the power of such systems are to be curbed. When
Joe Stiglitz (2002) draws the conclusion in his Globalization and Its Discontents (a
contribution with little or no discussion of globalisation itself) that the reason for poor
policy is the vested interest and ideology of finance, this comes on top of a life-time
or work in which neither vested interests nor ideology are even recognised other than
in the realms of the imperfectly informed optimiser.
5 Conclusion
I am acutely conscious that zombie movies rarely end happily, with best case
scenario being survival to live another day. Within the discipline of economics itself,
there is much to confirm, and regret, in adopting this perspective. This view is not
universally accepted, for there are those who believe that the signs of life in
zombieconomics, not least the innovations upon its frontiers in technique and subject
matter, will lead it to be transformed into something else, Colander et al (2004) and
Davis (2006) for example. This cannot be ruled out in principle but a zombie is a
zombie and the prospects of its becoming different and better are not bright.
What is more encouraging are the prospects for the renewal of political
economy across the social sciences despite the designs of, and in contest with,
economics imperialism. I see this as the consequence of the current dual retreat from
the extremes of both postmodernism and neo-liberalism, not least as the past decade
or so has witnessed a revival of interest in understanding contemporary capitalism,
systemically and simultaneously as both material and cultural system. In this light, the
current directions to be taken by social theory are remarkably open and are liable to
be diverse across disciplines and topics. It may not be possible to take the zombie out
of the economics but we can restore political economy to social science.
Footnotes
1
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth.
Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick
of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it
away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to
disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to
remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue
to create money”, Josiah Stamp, formerly a director of the Bank of England, and
reputedly the second richest man in England
2
For a survey of “neuroeconomics”, see Camerer et al (2005) although they take the
more rounded view that the optimising individual needs to be allowed other prompts
to action so that, “in the long run a more ‘radical’ departure from current theory will
become necessary, in the sense that the basic building blocks will not just consist of
preferences, constrained optimization and (market or game-theoretic) equilibrium”, p.
55. For an excellent critique, see Cavallero et al (2007), for whom neuroeconomics is
reductionist to the processes of the brain and hence, “mired in underdetermination
issues that its search for theoretical parsimony and predictive power combined with its
relegation of the social domain exacerbates”.
3
This section draws very heavily on Fine and Milonakis (2008).
4
This is the title of Colander and Landreth (eds) (1996), with subtitle, Conversations
with the Founders of Keynesian Economics.
5
Note that this piece by Galbraith was originally published in 1971. The later
interview in Colander and Landreth (1996) is much more measured and serious in
tone.
6
See also Colander and Landreth (1996, pp. 12 and 142).
7
See also Backhouse and Medema (2007a) and especially Lee (2009).
8
See Lee (2009) for a detailed account of the politics and ideology influencing the
evolution of mainstream (American) economics in the post-war period.
9
Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy (1966) is the classic text, but Sweezy’s
(1946) first major text of Marxist political economy had already appeared twenty
years earlier. See Fine (2007) for an account of Sweezy’s puzzling conversion to
Marxism, and reference to wider discussion.
10
Subsequently famous as a meeting place, not least in its association with the
satirical magazine, Private Eye.
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